i love ya, tomorrow

The big day is almost here. The Muppet lunchbox is out of the pantry. The yoga mat is tucked in the penguin backpack. School starts tomorrow.

While I feel fairly certain that this classroom is the best place for Martin right now, my relief comes mostly from the fact that he simply cannot be expelled (at least for being autistic...I guess he could get the boot if he brought a gun to school). I'm not going to get a phone call that Martin is misbehaving and the teacher doesn't know what to do. Martin might misbehave. He might frustrate his teacher. Nevertheless, there has to be a place for him at public school, just as he is, no matter what. After a year-and-a-half of walking on eggshells, I can breathe a sigh of relief.

It might seem like low standards when your most powerful feelings about a school stems from your kid's lower chance of expulsion. Of course, I care about how Martin will spend his day, who he'll get to know, and what he'll learn. But Martin finds a way to learn even in the worst circumstances. Despite all the craziness of this past fall, his language exploded and his reading totally took off. Even if his new classroom is only average in comparison to other autism-specific classrooms, it will be far more suited to him than his classroom or homeschool experiences of the past semester.

In the end, tomorrow's transition might mean the most to me and my husband. We hope that it provides the stability we've been searching for and a break from all the work we've done on our own. If it does even a little bit in either of these two areas, I can easily say that I love the new school.